Rainy WCity: A Real Rainfall Dataset with Diverse Conditions for Semantic Driving Scene Understanding

Scene understanding in adverse weather conditions (e.g., rainy and foggy days) has drawn increasing attention, arising some specific benchmarks and algorithms. However, scene segmentation under rainy weather is still challenging and under-explored due to the following limitations on the datasets and methods: 1) Manually synthetic rainy samples with empirically settings and human subjective assumptions; 2) Limited rainy conditions, including the rain patterns, intensity, and degradation factors; 3) Separated training manners for image deraining and semantic segmentation. To break these limitations, we pioneer a real, comprehensive, and well-annotated scene understanding dataset under rainy weather, named Rainy WCity. It covers various rain patterns and their bring-in negative visual effects, covering wiper, droplet, reflection, refraction, shadow, windshield-blurring, etc. In addition, to alleviate dependence on paired training samples, we design an unsupervised contrastive learning network for real image deraining and the final rainy scene semantic segmentation via multi-task joint optimization. A comprehensive comparison analysis is also provided, which shows that scene understanding in rainy weather is a largely open problem. Finally, we summarize our general observations, identify open research challenges, and point out future directions.